Checkmate - Dorothy Dunnett [294]
‘My men?’ Lymond said. Philippa, puzzled, also watched Lord Grey’s smooth bearded countenance.
‘The men who went missing, I hear, at Saint-Quentin. They were wounded and captured, so Austin says, and now appear to have escaped from the Spaniards. I can’t remember their names.’
‘Guthrie and Hoddim,’ said Francis quietly.
‘That’s right,’ said Lord Grey. ‘Well, they’re back. Your other men took them in. A party that went on for two days before three of them left for Thionville. They seem to have survived that bungle into the bargain.’
He went on to speak of his ransom. Philippa watched Francis, like herself, fail to listen. She knew from others the endless letters he had sent, the inquiries he had caused to be made in an effort to trace Alec Guthrie and Fergie Hoddim. To join her pleasure to his demanded a gesture … and here again she must abstain, while even a dog could share its emotion.
But when he turned to her next, the blood risen high under his skin, she had, she believed, banished the thought and was sitting, her hands still in her lap, smiling at him.
Chapter 4
Le grand caché long temps soubs les tenebres
Tiedira fer dans la playe sanguine …
Et Dame par force de frayeur honorée.
The three weeks of his grace passed, during which the bâton lay untouched in the parlour at Sevigny and, barring once, he did not refer to it.
Coming home from Onzain, she had said, ‘You must make your own decision. I do not need you now every day, or even every week, or every month.’
And he had said, ‘I have made my decision. I am not going back.’
She did not argue with him because the unspoken issues were clear, and she had already had her case made for her by Grey of Wilton. It was true that she did not need his care now to live; that wit was coming back if not laughter; that they could without fear separate for some parts of the day and find something of interest before, like self meeting self, they joined company again on returning.
They rediscovered trivial conversation over backgammon and pall mall and archery, and talk of another kind with the scholars who increasingly called on them. Francis brought her some books by Thevet and Gilles, and they began, with their gift of tongues, to consider some works of translation.
Poetry she did not attempt, but once, in the bright austere light after sunrise she sat down at the spinet and picked out, within earshot, a short soulless measure in counterpoint. He did not come in, so presently she abandoned it.
Now that he knew he could leave her, he took some time, she observed, to recover his acquaintance with the sun and air and wind which had been his habitat until three months previously. There were men who could engage in rougher sports with him than she could manage. He used the jeu de paume court, often alone, whenever time let him, but when he hunted or shot it was with Archie. For Archie’s silence, she knew how much they were both indebted.
Through it all he had taken no solace of drugs or of wine; nor had he offered her any. The therapy had been companionship, through all the day and as much of the night as she needed it, sitting in the long, lit grand’ salle until, at length, she could bring herself to go to her chamber. It was in that cruel, brilliant theatre of the salon that she had told him, late one night, that she was not going to bear a child to Leonard Bailey.
By then, they were already so deeply in tune that words were rarely needed, and this was still so. The talking they did do was not in the hearing of others nor, in the early weeks, did it touch on the present or the future. Instead, he sat by her bedside and let her recall, moment by moment, all the long tale of their meetings.
It was then that she found that he had laid flat, himself, every defence against her: that she could, if she wished, enter and be received within this, the long-guarded citadel. And so she discovered, fragment by fragment, what he had never told anyone: the inner truth of all those events which, strung together, made up his unruly life. Then, of his own accord,